Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  38. Stephen O. Himoe to his wife, June 26, 1862, in Luther M. Kuhns, ed., “An Army Surgeon’s Letters to His Wife,” Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association 7 (1914), 311–12; Lucius Hubbard to Mary Hubbard, Sept. 8, 1862, in N. B. Martin, ed., “Letters of a Union Officer: L. F. Hubbard and the Civil War,” Minnesota History 35 (1957), 314–15.

  39. O.R. 11, i:73–74.

  40. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln: Supplement 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 141; “General Orders No. 109,” Aug. 16, 1862, O.R., series 3, vol. 2, p. 397. See also Daniel Sutherland, “Lincoln, Pope, and the Origins of Total War,” Journal of Military History 56 (Oct. 1992), 567–86.

  41. New York Times, July 27, 1862.

  42. McClellan to Ellen, July 17, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 362; McClellan to Halleck, Aug. 1, 1862, O.R. 11, iii:345–46.

  43. McClellan to Ellen, Aug. 8, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 388; “General Orders No. 154,” Aug. 9, 1862, O.R. 11, iii:362–64.

  44. McClellan to Lincoln, July 7, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

  45. Lincoln to Cuthbert Bullitt, July 28, 1862, Lincoln to August Belmont, July 31, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:344–46, 350–51.

  46. John Sherman to William T. Sherman, Aug. 24, 1862, in Rachel T. Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: Correspondence Between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 156–57; Boston Advertiser, Aug. 20, 1862.

  47. Basler, Collected Works, 5:317–19.

  48. William Whiting, The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation to Rebellion, Treason, and Slavery, 7th ed. (Boston: J. L. Shorey, 1863), passim.

  49. Gideon Welles, “The History of Emancipation,” Galaxy 14 (Dec. 1872), 842–43. See also Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), 1:70–71.

  50. Basler, Collected Works, 5:336–37; Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 20–22; John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 1, Journals, 1829–1872 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993), 351, journal entry of July 22, 1862.

  51. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 22.

  CHAPTER 5: DESTROY THE REBEL ARMY, IF POSSIBLE

  1. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 5:323; Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 1:559–60, entry of July 15, 1862.

  2. The best account of this exchange is Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988), 238–42. For the correspondence on this and related matters, see Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 369–93; Halleck to McClellan, Aug. 6, 1862, O.R. 12, ii:9–11. See also John F. Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of General Henry W. Halleck (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 135–39.

  3. Meigs to Halleck, July 28, 1862, O.R. 11, iii:340–41.

  4. Pease and Randall, Diary of Browning, 1:563, entry of July 25, 1862.

  5. William Marvel, Burnside (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 99–100; Burnside’s testimony to the Committee on the Conduct of the War, Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 37th Cong., 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1863), 2:650.

  6. O.R. 12, iii:473–74.

  7. McClellan to Ellen, Aug. 10, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 389–90.

  8. Halleck to his wife, Aug. 9, 1862, in James Grant Wilson, “General Halleck: A Memoir,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States (Governor’s Island, N.Y.: Military Service Institution, 1905), 557.

  9. McClellan to Ellen, Aug. 10, 23, 24, Sears, Civil War Papers, 389, 400, 404.

  10. Buell to McClellan, Dec. 10, 1862, Civil War Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  11. Halleck to Buell, July 8, 1862, Buell to Halleck, July 11, 1862, O.R. 16, ii:104.

  12. Halleck to Buell, Aug. 12, 18, 1862; Halleck to Gen. Horatio Wright, Aug. 25, 1862, ibid., ii:314–15, 360, 421.

  13. For some examples, see Basler, Collected Works, 5:408, 409, 410, 416, 419.

  14. O.R. 16, ii:530.

  15. Ibid., 538–39, 549, 554–55.

  16. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Charles Francis Adams, Aug. 27, 1862, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 1:177–78.

  17. Porter to Manton Marble, Aug. 10, 1862, Marble Papers, Library of Congress, quoted in T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 148.

  18. This remarkable series of telegrams and events is conveniently reprinted and chronicled in Sears, Civil War Papers, 410–19.

  19. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 191–92, entry of April 28, 1864.

  20. Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies, 146–53.

  21. McClellan to Lincoln, Aug. 29, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 416; Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 37, diary entry of Sept. 1, 1862.

  22. Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 37th Cong., 2:363; The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3 vols. (New York: McClure Co., 1907–8), 2:382.

  23. Adams Hill to Sydney Howard Gay, Sept. 1, 1862, quoted in Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1983), 13.

  24. New York Tribune, Sept. 4, 1862; New York Times, Sept. 5, 1862.

  25. New York Times, Sept. 7, 1862.

  26. Henry Pearson to “friend,” Sept. 5, 1862, in Annette Tapert, ed., The Brothers’ War: Civil War Letters to Their Loved Ones from the Blue and Gray (New York: Times Books, 1988), 85; Washington Roebling to his father, early September 1862, in Paul M. Angle and Earl Schenck Miers, eds., Tragic Years 1860–1865, 2 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 1:344–45; Davis S. Sparks, ed., Inside Lincoln’s Army: The Diary of General Marsena Rudolph Patrick (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), 140, entry of Sept. 6, 1862.

  27. Adams Hill to Sydney Howard Gay, Aug. 31, 1862, quoted in Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 293n.; John Hay’s diary entry of Sept. 1, 1862, ibid., 36–37.

  28. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), 1:93–102, entries of Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, 1862; John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 1, Journals, 1829–1872 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993), 366–68, diary entries of Aug. 29, 30, 31, Sept. 1, 1862.

  29. McClellan to Ellen, Sept. 5, 7, 8, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 435, 438, 440.

  30. Beale, Diary of Gideon Welles, 1:104–13, entries of Sept. 2 and 7, 1862; Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 38–39, entry of Sept. 5, 1862; Basler, Collected Works, 5:486n., quoting a notation on the Sept. 2 cabinet meeting written by Attorney General Edward Bates. See also Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 475–80.

  31. William H. Powell and George Kimball quoted in Clarence C. Buel and Robert U. Johnson, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1888), 2:490n. and 550–51n.; Stephen M. Weld to his father, Sept. 4, 1862, War Diary and Letters of Stephen Minot Weld 1861–1865 (Boston: Riverside Press, 1912), 136.

  32. Chicago Tribune, Sept. 9, 1862.

  33. O.R. 19, ii:281.

  34. McClellan to Halleck, Sept. 15, 1862 (two telegrams), ibid., ii:294–95.

  35. Lincoln to McClellan, Sept. 15, 1862; Lincoln to Jesse K. DuBois, Sept. 1
5, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:425–26.

  36. O.R. 19, ii:322. Of the many books on the Battle of Antietam, the best are Sears, Landscape Turned Red, and James V. Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee’s Maryland Campaign, September 1862 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1965).

  37. McClellan to Halleck, Sept. 19, 1862 (two telegrams), O.R. 19, ii:330; Beale, Diary of Gideon Welles, 1:140, entry of Sept. 19, 1862.

  38. McClellan to Ellen, Sept. 18, 20 (two letters), Sears, Civil War Papers, 469, 473, 476.

  39. Pinkerton to McClellan, Sept. 22, 1862, in James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett, The Pinkerton Story (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951), 111–14.

  40. New York Times, Sept. 18, 21, 1862.

  41. Arthur B. Carpenter to parents, Dec. 5, 1861, quoted in Thomas R. Bright, “Yankees in Arms: The Civil War as a Personal Experience,” Civil War History 19 (Sept. 1973), 202.

  42. Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 14; V. Jacque Voegeli, Free but Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 18.

  43. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1952), 112.

  44. Basler, Collected Works, 5:370–75.

  45. Niven, Chase Papers, Journals, 362; entry of Aug. 15, 1862.

  46. Lincoln to Greeley, Aug. 22, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:388–89.

  47. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 6:157; Basler, Collected Works, 6:419–25.

  48. Beale, Diary of Gideon Welles, 1:142–45; Niven, Chase Papers, Journals, 393–95, entries of Sept. 22, 1862; Basler, Collected Works, 5:433–36.

  49. Niven, Chase Papers, Journals, 395; Beale, Diary of Gideon Welles, 143–44; Gideon Welles, “The History of Emancipation,” The Galaxy 14 (1872), 842–43.

  50. New York Tribune, Sept. 23, 24, 1862.

  51. T. J. Barnett to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Sept. 25, 1862, Barlow Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Halleck to Grant, March 31, 1863, O.R. 24, iii:157.

  52. Basler, Collected Works, 5:436–37.

  53. Porter to Manton Marble, Sept. 30, 1862, Sears, George B. McClellan, 325; McClellan to Ellen, Sept. 25, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 481.

  54. McClellan to Aspinwall, Sept. 26, 1862, McClellan to Ellen, Oct. 5, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 482, 490.

  55. Basler, Collected Works, 5:442–43, 508–9; Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 232, entry of Sept. 25, 1864.

  56. O.R. 19, ii:395; original in Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; also in Sears, Civil War Papers, 493–94.

  57. O.R. 19, i:272.

  CHAPTER 6: THE PROMISE MUST NOW BE KEPT

  1. Halleck to Buell, Oct. 19, 23, O.R. 16, ii:627, 638.

  2. Lincoln to McClellan, Oct. 13, 1862, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 5:460–61.

  3. Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative. Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York: Random House, 1958), 430.

  4. Rufus Ingalls to Montgomery Meigs, Oct. 26, 1862, O.R. 19, ii:492–93.

  5. Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 37th Cong., 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1863), 2:135; Edward Hagerman, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988), xiii, xv.

  6. Lincoln to Nathaniel P. Banks, Nov. 22, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:505–6.

  7. Oliver P. Morton to Lincoln, Oct. 21, 1862, Morton and Richard Yates to Lincoln, Oct. 25, 1862, Halleck to Rosecrans, Oct. 23, 24, 1862, O.R. 19, ii:634, 639, 640–42.

  8. William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation (New York: The Free Press, 1999), esp. chap. 3.

  9. Michael Burlingame, ed., An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 16, from an interview by Nicolay with Ozias Hatch in 1875.

  10. New York Times, Oct. 16, 19, 1862; Joseph Medill to Ozias M. Hatch, Oct. 13, 1862, in James V. Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee’s Maryland Campaign, September 1862 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), 300.

  11. Halleck to Hamilton R. Gamble, Oct. 30, 1862, O.R., series 3, vol. 2, pp. 703–4.

  12. Missouri Republican, Oct. 5, 1862, in Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 314–16; David Davis to Leonard Swett, Nov. 26, 1862, quoted in Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 132.

  13. Lincoln to McClellan, Oct. 13, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:460–61.

  14. Halleck to McClellan, Oct. 14, 1862, O.R. 19, ii:421; Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, Oct. 25, 1862, ibid., i:21–22.

  15. Ibid., 19, ii:485–86; Lincoln to McClellan, Oct. 25, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:474; McClellan to Ellen, Oct. 29, 1862, in Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 515.

  16. McClellan to Lincoln, Oct. 25, 1862, O.R. 19, ii:485; Lincoln to McClellan, Oct. 26, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:477.

  17. Lincoln to McClellan, Oct. 26, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:477.

  18. Francis P. Blair to Montgomery Blair, Nov. 7, 1862, in William E. Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 2:144.

  19. Basler, Collected Works, 5:485; O.R. 19, ii:549; McClellan to Ellen, Nov. 7, 1862, Sears, Civil War Papers, 520.

  20. Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln’s Army (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951), 334–36; William F. Keeler to Anna Keeler, Nov. 9, 1864, in Robert W. Daly, ed., Aboard the USS Florida, 1863–1865: The Letters of Paymaster William F. Keeler (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1968), 200.

  21. Basler, Collected Works, 5:484.

  22. Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington and Co., 1890), 556. Although these words were written from memory nearly thirty years later by a woman who heard them, this quotation is remarkably similar to a memorandum that Lincoln wrote in November 1862, which included the words “hard desperate fighting.” Basler, Collected Works, 5:484.

  23. J. C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 52.

  24. O.R. 19, ii:552–54.

  25. Halleck to Burnside, Nov. 14, 1862, ibid., ii:579.

  26. Burnside to Halleck, Dec. 17, 1862; Halleck to Burnside, Jan. 7, 1863, ibid., 21, 66–67, 953–54; Halleck’s Report, Nov. 15, 1863, ibid., 46–47; Halleck’s and Meigs’s testimony to the Committee on the Conduct of the War, Report of the Joint Committee, 2:675, 680.

  27. Basler, Collected Works, 5:514–15.

  28. William Henry Wadsworth to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Dec. 16, 1862, Barlow Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Basler, Collected Works, 6:13.

  29. Samuel Wilkeson to Sydney Howard Gay, Dec. 19, 1862, Gay Papers, Columbia University Library; Theodore C. Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Library, 1927), 1:600–601, entry of Dec. 18, 1862.

  30. The best contemporary accounts of this affair are Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), 1:194–204; and Pease and Randall, Diary of Browning, 1:596–604. The best secondary accounts are Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 2, War Becomes Revolution (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 350–65; Phillip Shaw Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence, Kans.: Kansas University Press, 1994), 170–77; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1995), 398–406; and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 486–95.

  31. Franklin and Smith to Lincoln, Dec. 20, 1862, O.R. 21, 868–70; Lincoln to Franklin and Smith, Dec. 22, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 6:15.

  32. Burnside’s, Newton’s, and Cochrane’s testimony to the Committee on the Conduct of the War, Report of the Joint Committee, 37th Cong., 2:717–21, 730–46; Lincoln to Burnside, Dec. 30, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 6:22; Burnside to Lincoln, Dec. 30, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.